Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday March 09, 2009 @09:01AM
from the optimus-phone dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It's not sci-fi, but rather advanced robotics research which is leading Intel to envision shape-shifting smartphones. 'Imagine what you would do with this material,' says Jason Campbell, a senior researcher at Intel's Pittsburgh Lab who's working in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University. 'If you want to carry the device, you'd make it as small as possible by making it pack itself as densely as possible. When you go to surf the Web, you're going to make it big.' The material being studied is transparent silicon-dioxide hemispheres, which can roll around each other under electrical control to create different shapes. The lab has built 6-inch long actuators, which it's working to reduce to 1-mm tube-sized prototypes. When will we see a shape-shifting phone? 'In terms of me being able to buy it, that's a difficult forecasting problem, because I have to guess about manufacturing costs,' Campbell said. 'I won't do that. But we hope the science will be proved out in three to five years.'"

You didn't watch the vid.... NM. I almost forgot where I was f.or a moment.

In the video, Jason Campbell said they hope to have it changed based on application. I'd presume that would indicate the shape is dictated by what program you're using or, probably at first, by mode buttons of some sort.

He's not a developer, he doesn't even work on cell phones. When he said "application" he's thinking of "cell phones" as an application for the material they're designing. I, on the other hand, am thinking of "shape-shifting robotic beer can" as an application.

'I won't do that. But we hope the science will be proved out in three to five years.'

I think that's an overly optimistic figure and I wish he would have commented on the date it would hit shelves as it's likely many decades into the future.

I'm probably captain obvious for saying this but as the complexity of our inventions reaches new highs (and requires more teams of people than just inventor-geniuses) it may increase the amount of time between inventing and actually marketing the product.

You may be able to argue that this has always been a long time with people like Charles Babbage or Nikola Tesla but I suspect it's going to get to the point where a lab researcher invents a way of doing something that does not hit everyday usage until well after his/her death. The ability to cheaply fabricate a device may be a bigger feat than development of the device. I seem to recall from some book (Three Cups of Tea?) that a man who worked on fabrication of computer chips & boards thought of a novel way to accomplish the task when he was in his shower and noticed how water ran off his skin. He somehow applied this to making computer boards more cheaply and effectively... and subsequently became very very rich (patents). A utilitarian might argue that this is the way it should be.

That's arguably already true. For example, the earliest ancestors of the automobile were first created in 1771. But the first production car didn't roll off the line until 1901, and were not mass produced cheaply until 1908.

A counterpoint is that Intel is a world leader in high tech manufacturing, and routinely builds end-to-end nanoscale high volume manufacturing processes AND factories, constantly. Like every other year. Innovations can be scaled pretty quickly in that environment.

But all Intel is doing is refining a known process. A new technology like this is more like the initial invention of printing integrated circuits using lithography where all the real world implications were unknown.

Science proved out in 3-5 years. Then how long to get manufacturing to commercial dependability and costs? Once it is on the market, how long until it is more than a high priced novelty? And, the most important question, will battery technology be good enough to power a shape shifting phone for a day or two?

... here's your new smart phone for this mission. Now, if you press this button it sends us a GPS signal so that we know exactly where you are. This button activates the camera, this button activates the sound recorder, and this button makes it shapeshift into a particularly nasty little knife. I'm sure you'll find excellent uses for them all.

If this technology was so world changing, then why would they be talking about it at such an early stage? Because some engineer somewhere realizes that the technology will never work...

What the video clearly demonstrates to me is that Intel is now clearly run by marketing people rather than solid engineering as it once was. Meaning, why would you had one of your "research" people spending time talking about some "pie in the sky" stuff instead of actually doing something?

There are also (more limited) shape-changing phones in development that don't require nanotech. The Nokia 888 [nokia888.com] (which I just discovered by spending too much time on YouTube after looking up the Morph) is merely a flexible LCD on a permissive backing with an elastic. Probably viable (though not economic) within a few years, unlike nanotech, which might be viable on an extra-large demo scale within 3-5 years (as according to the Intel developer in TFA).

While watching that video I kept thinking that the evil race car drivers from the Ah-ha's "Take on Me" music video were gonna creep up behind the woman and whack her on the head with a wrench and steal her Morph-a-phone.

Is this some bullshit attempt by Intel at a viral marketing campaign? There is ZERO science behind this and the other "shape-shifting" video they released. Glass spheres manipulated by electric fields? What? That makes no sense at all.

First the guy waves some rather mundane-looking actuators in front of the camera like they're somehow related to this idea. Then he wows the audience by holding up two different blocks of material and making the controversial statement that each has the same amount of mat

Right, but I have to agree with the GP -- this is an R&D guy talking about creating a sponge that can contract on demand (yeah, that's simplifying a bit). Its neat, but its a LONG way from a cell phone that turns itself into a laptop. The stupid author is conveniently ignoring the difficult part, which is that a cell phone is not a sponge or just a blob of material. It has a processor, a display, etc.

The R&D guy was essentially bringing up the cell phone thing as an example a problem where shape

This will be great stuff, until the big three get ahold of it and disable the "internet shape profile" and the "flip phone shape profile", and the "portable to another technically identical network shape profile"